Typhoon Encounters: How Politics Influences the Naval Response
Disciplines
History of the Pacific Islands | Military History | Political History
Abstract (300 words maximum)
The thesis of this paper is that the political and military situation surrounding navies in the late 19th and 20th century shaped how those navies responded to encounters with typhoons. Between the sixty-year period of 1889 to 1945, three separate typhoons formed, struck, and severely damaged various nations’ naval fleets across the Western Pacific. Individually, these events were isolated incidents with very little connection between them. However, case studies of each event reveal a pattern in the human response to such natural disasters. The first of these, the Apia Typhoon that struck the island of Samoa in 1889, defused a spark of war between the United States and Germany. The second event, termed the Fourth Fleet Incident, occurred in 1935 when a Japanese fleet preforming training maneuvers sailed into a typhoon at sea, reshaping how the Japanese designed their warships in the pre-World War II period. The final case study occurred in the final stages of the Second World War, when an American fleet off the coast of the Philippines sailed into a typhoon and lost nearly nine-hundred men and three destroyers, suffering the greatest uncompensated loss of life in three years. However, due to the overwhelming advantage of the United States over Japan in the war at this time, the incident was largely ignored and only resulted in the construction of weather stations throughout the Pacific. Through the use of newspapers, diaries, naval reports, and even the Washington and London Naval Treaties, this project utilizes primary source evidence to show that the response to typhoon disasters among navies of the Pacific is still at heart a matter of politics.
Academic department under which the project should be listed
RCHSS - History & Philosophy
Primary Investigator (PI) Name
Eric Oakley
Typhoon Encounters: How Politics Influences the Naval Response
The thesis of this paper is that the political and military situation surrounding navies in the late 19th and 20th century shaped how those navies responded to encounters with typhoons. Between the sixty-year period of 1889 to 1945, three separate typhoons formed, struck, and severely damaged various nations’ naval fleets across the Western Pacific. Individually, these events were isolated incidents with very little connection between them. However, case studies of each event reveal a pattern in the human response to such natural disasters. The first of these, the Apia Typhoon that struck the island of Samoa in 1889, defused a spark of war between the United States and Germany. The second event, termed the Fourth Fleet Incident, occurred in 1935 when a Japanese fleet preforming training maneuvers sailed into a typhoon at sea, reshaping how the Japanese designed their warships in the pre-World War II period. The final case study occurred in the final stages of the Second World War, when an American fleet off the coast of the Philippines sailed into a typhoon and lost nearly nine-hundred men and three destroyers, suffering the greatest uncompensated loss of life in three years. However, due to the overwhelming advantage of the United States over Japan in the war at this time, the incident was largely ignored and only resulted in the construction of weather stations throughout the Pacific. Through the use of newspapers, diaries, naval reports, and even the Washington and London Naval Treaties, this project utilizes primary source evidence to show that the response to typhoon disasters among navies of the Pacific is still at heart a matter of politics.